Public Safety Committee on Nov. 8th, 2018

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

The other part is that both court cases talked about the length of time that a person would be in segregation. That was addressed in both of them. I believe there was also a lot of discussion in the B.C. case about how hard it can be. There are some instances where if it's 15 days, it might be hard to have that as a hard cap. That was some of the evidence.

What I'm wondering is whether you have any idea of how to deal with those cases if the criticism that we're being faced with from the courts and from the Mandela rules is that you need a hard cap. There was some discussion about that. There was some evidence that having a hard cap was better for the mental health of the people in prisons because they can see where the end point is.

Do you have any suggestions for dealing with these hard-cap type of ideas and how to minimize it?

[Jason Godin]

The hard cap is virtually impossible to implement. You have to remember that we have cases in which we may be successful, after 10 or 15 days, to release the inmate back into the population, but then we can have self-harming cases or cases where inmates are extremely violent, where they go beyond the 15 or 30 days. We can't just put a hard cap on it. Each individual case is different.

If you take a look at the Burnside decision in Nova Scotia, where the judge ruled there.... I'm aware of the three decisions across the country, but even the Burnside decision said that for the most violent, volatile inmates, it becomes necessary to sometimes keep inmates in for longer periods of time.

You also have to keep in mind that some of our inmates request to be there. I can tell you that as recently as a couple of weeks ago, at Stony Mountain, we were being told to take inmates out of segregation, and inmates were saying, “No, you're not taking me out of here. This is where I live.”

We have to have some kind of a balance. Putting a hard cap in place is going to be detrimental to the inmates, and certainly to the staff's safety and security. Sometimes inmates just need to go into segregation for quiet time, and sometimes they need longer than 10 or 15 days or whatever.

There are all kinds of reasons why we can't have a hard cap. With a self-harming, volatile, violent inmate, we can't just suddenly say, “Okay, 15 days is up. We're going to send you back into a population range.” Then what's going to happen is that we're going to disrupt that entire range. We can't allow that to happen. That's why we can't agree to a hard cap.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. Dabrusin.

Colleagues, I'm down to about two minutes, but we did get started late, so my thought is that we give Mrs. Boucher five minutes, give Ms. Damoff five minutes, and call it a night.

[Michel Picard, Liberal, Montarville, QC]

We can't stay.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

We have problems with travel schedules.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Do we have problems?

Okay, Mrs. Boucher, finish it off.

[Sylvie Boucher, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix, CPC]

I have a quick question to ask, in particular to Mr. Jason Godin.

I understand that you were not consulted regarding this bill. However, you're well-positioned to understand the situation since you work in the correctional setting, and in maximum security prisons since we're talking about federal institutions here. We've introduced a bill that could be either good or bad—I haven't read all of it—without consulting people like you who live in the correctional setting on a day-to-day basis.

What is the first thing that we should have done before writing this bill? What is it that the correctional environment actually needs?

[Jason Godin]

If you're asking from a front-line perspective, the real need is to sit down and discuss the statistics currently out there. Let's share the information. Let's see what's happening. Are we having problems in certain institutions or certain units because something is triggering that? We don't seem to have those discussions. Unfortunately, the department is not very forthcoming with statistical data where we can take a look at that, although recently they finally released a report on assaults on staff, which we've been advocating for, for a long time.

The other thing is, let's have a discussion about reality and resources. I've read the bill very thoroughly. If we're talking about four hours outside a cell, I can tell you that's impossible the way we're structured right now from a staffing and a health care standpoint. Before we get into introducing bills, in our view, these are some of the conversations or some of the legwork that needs to be done ahead of our introducing this type of bill.

Again, we're not completely opposed to some of the things in the bill, but at the same time we need to have those consultations begin on the front end. The fear of correctional officers is that we're going to implement the cart before the horse. The cart is out of the barn running and the horse is chasing it. We need to start engaging those discussions earlier, before we see a bill. Let's have real conversations.

I can't emphasize enough that we're the ones running the institutions. Yes, we have our wardens and our parole board and everybody has a role to play, but at the end of the day, on weekends and during the night, correctional officers are operating the facility, nobody else. We need to know exactly, ahead of time, where we're going with these types of bills and what impact it's going to have on us.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Okay, we'll have to leave you there, Ms. Boucher.

[Sylvie Boucher]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

With that, I want to thank Mr. Godin and Mr. Benson for their testimony here.

Colleagues, have a good constituency week.

The meeting is adjourned.